Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. With Halloween behind us and the holiday season spooling up, here are some other stories that RadWaste Monitor was tracking from across the civilian nuclear power space this week.
The California congressman at the forefront of nuclear waste policy on Capitol Hill introduced legislation this week that would require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to certify spent fuel canisters for a century of use.
If made law, Rep. Mike Levin’s (D-Calif.) proposed bill, unveiled Thursday, would direct NRC to create new federal regulations barring the certification of any spent fuel storage system or individual storage cask “without a finding that such system or facility can safely operate with spent nuclear fuel for a period of at least 100 years.” Current regulations require spent fuel canisters to have an operating lifetime of at least 40 years.
“Safety should always be the top priority when it comes to managing nuclear waste,” said Levin, whose district includes the former San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, in a press release Thursday. “It is clear that nuclear waste canisters should be certified to safely store spent nuclear fuel for at least 100 years so that we can have the peace of mind that all canisters, both at San Onofre and across the country, remain safe during continued on-site storage and during the transportation process to a future storage site.”
Aspirant nuclear waste company Deep Isolation announced this week that it would design a waste disposal plan for Argonne National Laboratory’s spent fuel recycling project.
Berkeley, Calif.-based Deep Isolation will “develop an integrated waste disposal plan using its cost-effective deep borehole repository technology” for waste generated by the Argonne recycling program, the company said in a press release Wednesday. The national lab project aims to develop and demonstrate a process, known as oxide reduction, that could be used to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from light water reactors into fuel usable by advanced reactors.
The Argonne recycling program Oct. 21 received a roughly $4.9 million grant from the Department of Energy. DOE awarded a total of $38 million to a dozen research teams exploring spent fuel reprocessing technologies.
The Polish government this week selected Westinghouse Electric Company to build the country’s first three new nuclear reactors, the company said in a press release.
Poland’s council of ministers Wednesday signed a resolution tapping the Cranberry, Pa., nuclear manufacturing company to be the technology supplier for the country’s new nuclear energy program, Westinghouse said in the press release. Warsaw aims to add up to nine gigawatts of nuclear energy capacity, starting with three new reactors at the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in the country’s north.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the partnership in a Wednesday press release. “This agreement will ensure a decades-long strategic energy partnership between the United States and Poland and is a watershed moment in advancing European energy security,” Blinken said.
Repair work is under way this week at the embattled Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which was once again disconnected from external power this week, according to the United Nations’ nuclear power authority.
The Zaporizhzhya plant, located in eastern Ukraine, had its main external power line damaged Wednesday by fighting between the Ukrainian military and invading Russian forces, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a press release Thursday. The plant’s backup power line was also disconnected, IAEA said.
Zaporizhzya’s connection to the external power grid, necessary for some essential operations such as cooling the facility’s six reactors, has been the subject of international concern since Moscow seized the site in early March. The plant has backup diesel generators that can provide emergency power in the event of offsite power loss.
